News and Commentary: Claude Sautet 100!

It is Claude Sautet’s centennial year. A cause for celebration at Mid Century Cinema, but for many it might be an occasion to say, “who is Claude Sautet”? Which would be understandable. Sautet, who died a quarter of a century ago, left us only fourteen films (as writer-director) over a forty year career. And none of them could be called blockbusters. On the other hand, he was not what you would call obscure. Celebrated at international film festivals and nominated ten times for France’s César Awards (winning twice), upon his death, he was lauded by the Prime Minister of France, who said his movies “held out the mirror of our times.”

Sautet was, I think, ultimately a “filmmaker’s filmmaker”—admired and respected especially by his peers, the way that prominent musicians revere legendary sidemen and session players who are very rarely household names. As Bertrand Tavernier recalled of his mentor, Sautet “was the greatest script doctor and fix-it editor in French cinema. Everyone, including Truffaut, consulted him . . . He improved, repaired, patched up a very large number of French films and saved several from disaster.” In addition to his uncredited contributions, Sautet, who cut his teeth as an assistant director on a dozen films in the 1950s (including the very fine noir Back to the Wall, starring Jeanne Moreau), also co-wrote a number of notable films, including Georges Franju’s classic Eyes without a Face.

His feature films, however, remain his enduring legacy. They are, as noted, few in number (our user’s guide follows the images below), and, with one possible exception, small in scale. As Roger Ebert observed, “Claude Sautet makes movies the way people live—he traces the connections between the mistakes, and celebrates the occasional victories.” His career started out with a bang—Classe Tours Risques (1960), with Lino Ventura, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Marcel Dalio, takes its place among the great debut features in history. (Jean-Pierre Melville was another filmmaker quick to sing Sautet’s praises, and the affinities between Risques and Melville’s Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), also starring Ventura, are notable.)

Now properly recognized as a classic (see Classe Tours Risques now if you haven’t yet), Sautet’s first film didn’t gain him much traction in the industry, and it would be five years before his next feature, The Dictator’s Guns, again with Lino Ventura. Although watchable, it is a bit of an odd enterprise, starting out as a well-shot, hard-edged James Bond type affair, before pivoting towards a more inward looking, existentialist drama of isolation. It was a commercial failure, and Sautet would spend the balance of the decade waiting for his next chance.

If the sixties were frustrating, the following decade would prove to be the opposite. Sautet’s most prolific and celebrated period – six films, three of them exceptional, and not a clunker in the bunch – it is the seventies with which this filmmaker is appropriately associated. All of these efforts are interpersonal dramas, involving complex relationships between men and women, often with an undercurrent of subtle rivalries between male friends. Sautet also found his stock company, most notably with Romy Schneider, who appeared in five of his films, Yves Montand (also a five-timer) and Michel Piccoli (three). And, for reasons that we have not yet been able to decode, in most of these movies characters find themselves caught outside in the rain. (Feel free to write in with pet theories—this rain thing cannot be a coincidence.)

Of the seventies films, three stand out in particular. The Things of Life, with Piccoli and Schneider, is a brilliant effort that anticipates all the Sautetian motifs of the decade, and, boy, can that guy shoot a car crash. Max and the Junkmen (Schneider and Piccoli again), which we have written about previously, is quite a different affair—and possibly our favorite of this sextet. Vincent, Francois, Paul, and the Others might not quite scale the heights of the other two, but I will never tire of watching old friends Montand, Piccoli, and Serge Reggiani navigating their (at times enmeshed) midlife crises. As for the others—I guess the point is we are in desperate need of a well-appointed box set of all six of these movies, with lots of extra features.

In the eighties, Sautet, like so many great filmmakers of the time, seemed somewhat adrift. He would make only three films. Each of them has appealing characteristics, but none of them quite soar (our notes on Garcon! open with “a nice piece of business that is not obviously going anywhere). Happily, this auteur regained his footing in late career; A Heart in Winter (1992), with Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, and André Dussollier is a flat out masterpiece; Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud (1995) with Béart, Michel Serrault (and a key supporting turn by the invariably outstanding Michael Lonsdale) a very fine note on which to finish.